> The tricolon has a superficial resemblance to a vertical ellipsis, but...
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> The tricolon has a superficial resemblance to a vertical ellipsis, but...
Unicode here introducing a weird variation to a character that I also didn't know about.
The vertical ellipsis isn't too surprising in retrospect, scripts with vertical layout need it for the same reason horizontal scripts need the ellipsis.
Not the same as the mathematical ellipsis used to elide matrix rows and columns. Except that asian script text often uses it in lieu of the ellipsis due to layout considerations.
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In asian typographic tradition, the ellipsis is drawn on the text midline, rather than the western tradition of aligning to the baseline of the text. But many layout engines didn't do this properly. OTOH the mathematical ellipsis character gets placed on the "mathematical centerline", which isn't the same as the text centerline but is often close enough that it works out.
And so, non mathematical text uses the character meant for matrix notation instead of the proper semantic character.
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Even better, fonts and rendering engines then try to detect this usage, and nudge the mathematical ellipsis from the mathematical centerline back to the text centerline, without (hopefully) breaking math notation in the process.
So, a human convention that arose because layout engines didn't do ellipses properly in asian text has now resulted in layout engines that do understand asian scripts having even more contextual heuristics to fix up the hack humans came up with. Amazing.
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Really, given what we've done to writing as civilizations, is it any wonder fonts end up with a whole-ass embedded virtual machine to figure out wtf to even display
